To be fair it's not a real Nobel prize. It's paid for by a bank and it was first issued in 1968. One of Nobel's descendants is on record speculating that Nobel would never have agreed to the award. It's very much about public relations for the field of economics. The field's effect on the world has been to undermine democratic governments through the establishment of treaties that people never voted for and organizations comprised of people who were never elected. Governments merely act as middle managers to the "market" and their role is to keep their people within the constraints of these supposed universal truths. The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Science is a way for the field to convey prestige, expertise, and authority.
My personal take is that the field is stuck in an existential local minima and are self-conscious about it: similar to how astronomy was stuck on the model of concentric spheres. I think everybody who practices the field is unconsciously aware of it too which is why they lean on hand-waving charts and opaque math that anybody in a harder science would instinctively call bullshit on. How psychology got to be the poster boy for the replication crisis in the social sciences and not economics is baffling given the scope and depth of influence the field has had on the world.
We investigate two critical dimensions of the credibility of empirical economics research: statistical power and bias. We survey 159 empirical economics literatures that draw upon 64,076 estimates of economic parameters reported in more than 6,700 empirical studies. Half of the research areas have nearly 90% of their results under‐powered. The median statistical power is 18%, or less. A simple weighted average of those reported results that are adequately powered (power ≥ 80%) reveals that nearly 80% of the reported effects in these empirical economics literatures are exaggerated; typically, by a factor of two and with one‐third inflated by a factor of four or more.
My personal take is that the field is stuck in an existential local minima and are self-conscious about it: similar to how astronomy was stuck on the model of concentric spheres. I think everybody who practices the field is unconsciously aware of it too which is why they lean on hand-waving charts and opaque math that anybody in a harder science would instinctively call bullshit on. How psychology got to be the poster boy for the replication crisis in the social sciences and not economics is baffling given the scope and depth of influence the field has had on the world.
But don't take my word for it... https://academic.oup.com/ej/article-abstract/127/605/F236/50...